ABSTRACT
The second meaning is most pertinent to environmental sustainability. In pre-modern cultures there is evidence of populations disappearing as they outgrew natural resources. The issue emerged more forcefully during Europe’s fertility transition when Malthus (1798) cited famine, disease, and war as consequences of exponential demographic growth. During the 1960s and 1970s these warnings were reignited by a post-war baby boom that amplified the West’s rising per capita consumption to trigger concerns over resource shortages and environmental degradation. Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1972) and the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972) recommended population stabilization and a steady state economy. The UN Conference on the Human Environment (Stockholm 1972) refers in its fifth proclamation to continuous population growth as a source of problems for environmental preservation and its sixteenth principle recommends appropriate demographic policies where population growth rates or concentrations adversely affect the environment, provided these respect human rights.
